No-contact micromechanical systems last longer

Micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) are used extensively in devices such as the accelerometers and motors in mobile phones, but because they have moving parts which are in contact with each other, they tend to wear out. Such tiny mechanisms cannot be maintained in a practical sense, so must be replaced. This limits the lifetime of devices.

A research team at MIT in Boston has devised a method for moving a solid "stage" or platform on a chip without any solid parts in contact with each other. The stage can be raised and lowered while remaining parallel to the support chip, tilted or translated around. It does this by floating on a layer of liquid droplets on the surface of the chip, whose size and shape can be altered at will.

The system works by altering a particular property of the droplets of supporting liquid, which can be water or another solvent. The crucial property, called the contact angle, governs how the droplet sits on the surface and depends on the properties of the liquid and the surface itself. If a liquid has a small contact angle on a particular surface, the droplets are flat as the liquid spreads out. If the contact angle is larger, the droplets tend to sit intact on the surface in a more spherical shape. In a paper in the journal Applied Physics Letters, Daniel Preston of MIT's mechanical engineering department and colleagues describe how changing the voltage across the surface of the supporting chip makes droplets of water rounder and flatter under their control, raising, lowering and tilting a platform made from treated copper sitting on the liquid droplet layer.